Rise From The Ashes
by FlashyDwarf
Summary: Shepherd finds herself locked in battle, to save the galaxy and to fight her own past demons. Cannon with a little AU adaptation. Femshep/Garrus/Thane? Just go with me on this one. ;  Rated T for possible mild violence and future giggity.


Prologue.

It was sad, Shepherd thought as she twirled slowly and meaninglessly through the dense blackness, that something as beautiful as the Normandy could look so bleak and depressing as it's corpse plummeted angrily through the outer atmosphere towards the unknown silver planet beside her. She watched the hull, where Joker had sat merely minutes ago, as it broke off and disintegrated into flaming wreckage. She smiled, relieved that he and most of the crew had survived and her death would not have been in vain. She idly threw up a hand and grabbed the back of her suit, pinching the leaking oxygen tube between two fingers as every inch of her weightless body throbbed, sometimes freezing and sometimes searing hot from her painfully intense burns. She was glad she had no way of seeing herself, she somehow felt peace from imagining herself not as a charred space captain about to enter orbit and plummet to an impossibly cold planet and die in the wreckage of her home, her ship and for the past year her life.

She thought briefly of Tali; the lost, lonely space alien who would be exploring somewhere in the Flotilla looking for home. The two had communicated a few times, but she knew her friend was far too busy on her pilgrimage to entertain her old captain's nostalgia. Garrus seemed to be the only member of her crew who wrote, sometimes for advice, sometimes to poke a jibe at her, sometimes to discuss their lives but mostly because he too felt like a very small sentient being in a very large galaxy. He intended on joining C-Sec again but had abandoned it to begin Spectre training and eventually return to the Normandy and become Shepherd's first mate… Though to what end she didn't know. Her chest throbbed as she thought of what could have been between them. What could now never happen. She thought briefly of Wrex, the hard-faced Krogan who had left to lead his own clan and she hoped she would have inspired him not to seek humans on the battlefield so much.

She closed her eyes and thought of Kaidan. Such a bad move. Her heart rate began to climb as she regretfully remembered their last night of bliss together. She could never love him but at that moment she had felt that if she was about to die and she needed to at least know that someone had needed her. She needed to be held, longed for, admired, she never needed his love. And she felt that she never really received it. Their last parting words had involved Shepherd screaming at him to obey her orders and board the escape pod before the Normandy exploded. That would be the last he ever remembered of her. She was glad he would at least remember her as a captain and not a lover, he would remember how she had saved so many. Things would be said at her funeral that wouldn't have been said otherwise. She would inspire others to put their crew before themselves, and that gave her inner peace.

Liara T'Soni's voice whispered in Shepherd's ear as her consciousness began to fade. The hot imaginary breath down the back of her neck seemed to wrench her violently into a supposed peacefulness and suddenly began to mix with a slowly forming smell, familiar to Shepherd's nose. The faint scent of the long-dead Ashley Williams' perfume came to her and that was when it hit her that she was about to die. The whispering of her asari friend was hardly soothing as she writhed and the oxygen began to escape her lungs. She desperately struggled for breath but there was nothing. She made no noise, nothing could be heard in the vacuum of space. She looked straight ahead and watched the Normandy crash land on the surface of the planet which slowly grew before her as she approached it.

The whispering came to a halt. Shepherd's lungs emptied and collapsed in her chest. The smell of Ashley Williams disappeared. Her brain forgot how Kaiden Alenko had looked and felt as he lay over her that last night before their final battle. The message from the Protheans slipped away into nothingness. She forgot the names of all her companions, those she had loved. She forgot the throbbing in her chest as she craved the embrace of her Turian friend whose face she couldn't seem to piece together no matter how hard she tried. She forgot her name. She forgot that she had died saving others. It all seemed so vague and unnecessary now.

She closed her tear-streaked eyes, crossed her hands over her chest and forgot everything. She had finally embraced eternity.


End file.
